QuestionsWhat is happiness?The pendulum: from suffering to boredom
What is happiness?No lasting happiness

The pendulum: from suffering to boredom

Arthur Schopenhauer 1788 · 1860Life swings between suffering and boredom.
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What it claims

There is no lasting happiness: life swings like a pendulum between suffering and boredom.

Why

We swing between painful desire and boredom once satisfied, and contemplation lasts only a moment.

In short

"The pendulum: from suffering to boredom" is an argument by Arthur Schopenhauer (The World, I, § 38, 57, 58) on the question "What is happiness?" (answer: no lasting happiness). Its claim: There is no lasting happiness: life swings like a pendulum between suffering and boredom. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P5). AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

The World, I, § 38, 57, 58
Valid with an implicit premise

Schopenhauer's most famous argument. When we desire, we suffer from lack. When we get what we wanted, the pleasure fades at once and boredom arrives. So lasting happiness is impossible: life swings back and forth, like a pendulum, between the two.

P1Willing is our whole being, and all willing springs from a lack: to desire is to suffer.
P2Satisfaction is merely negative: it removes a desire, and the pleasure vanishes with it. It leaves nothing behind.
P3When there is nothing left to desire, there is emptiness and boredom: existence itself becomes a burden.
P4Desireless contemplation (before art or nature) truly frees us, but only for moments: no one has the strength to stay there long.
P5 · implicit premiseThere is no lasting state other than these three: desiring, being satisfied, or contemplating. In particular, there is no lasting positive joy, such as the pleasure of an activity loved for its own sake.
P6True and lasting happiness requires peace: it excludes suffering as well as boredom.
Therefore there is no lasting happiness: life swings like a pendulum between suffering and boredom.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, the computer finds a life where lasting happiness exists without being a desire, a satisfaction or a contemplation: for instance an activity loved for its own sake. Nothing then prevents this happiness from being free of suffering and boredom.
Valid with P5, which Schopenhauer does not state but which his whole reasoning assumes: desire, its satisfaction and contemplation would be the only ways of living a moment. That is the weak point. Aristotle and today's psychology describe another state: being absorbed in an activity one loves (playing music, researching, creating), where one desires without suffering and is not bored. If that state exists and can last, the pendulum is only part of life, not the whole of it. The other attacks target P2 (some pleasures follow no lack) and P4 (can contemplation last?).
Analogy. You wait weeks for a new phone: the waiting is painful. The day you get it, the joy is strong; then within days it becomes ordinary. You start wanting something else, or you get bored. Schopenhauer says all of life is like that. The question is: is there really nothing else, such as those hours when you are so absorbed in what you are doing that you want nothing more?

Objections

4

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Plato (pure pleasures) 375 BC · attacks premise 2

Not all pleasures are the end of a pain. The pleasure of a pleasant smell comes suddenly, with no lack beforehand, and leaves no pain when it stops. Believing that pleasure is merely the cessation of pain is an illusion.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Schopenhauer in the texts.
E
Epicurus (happiness is freedom from disturbance) 300 BC · attacks premise 3

Desiring nothing more is not necessarily boredom. The absence of pain in the body and of disturbance in the soul (ataraxia) is precisely the highest happiness, and the wise can live in it lastingly.

Schopenhauer replies
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
Schopenhauer
Schopenhauer partly agrees with Epicurus: this painless state is indeed the highest good, the state of the gods. But it is reached only by escaping from willing, in contemplation, and only for a moment.
Aristotle (happiness is an activity) 330 BC · attacks premise 4

Happiness is not a state one reaches but an activity, and pleasure accompanies and completes it. Contemplation, the activity of the intellect, is even the most continuous of all: one can contemplate longer than do anything else.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Schopenhauer in the texts.
Nietzsche 1889 · attacks the conclusion

A judgement on the value of life made by a living being proves nothing: it is only the symptom of a certain way of living. To judge life as a whole one would have to stand outside it, which is impossible. Schopenhauer's pessimism says something about Schopenhauer, not about life.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1889, after the author's death (1860).